the man who would be king
by amazuppai
Summary: While being part ghost has its perks, it has its downsides, too; namely, a vast lack of resources to turn to when something starts to go terribly wrong.


_**A/N**_ : This is set sometime after Infinite Realms, but before Torrent of Terror –before Vortex attacks, before Danny discovers his ice abilities, before a lot of the events that could have helped him occur.

* * *

While being part ghost has its perks, there are a fair few downsides when it comes to the territory. Being hunted, for one; by his parents, by the town, by the growing number of ghost hunters in the area, the occasional ghost who _is_ a hunter. The way that his life has come second to saving others, his school grades plummeting from his lack of time and concentration to keep them up. His free time, while other kids his age are at parties or the mall or studying in their rooms with music and a packet of candy on their beds, is spent in a constant state of moderate alert, monitoring the portal and patrolling the town. His friends often help, try to split the load, but they have lives, too; they don't have quite the same devotion that Danny does, and he knows this, appreciating them both all the same.

Then there is the power itself. He's never felt anything like it, the exhilaration of flight, the subtle change in pressure as he passes through a solid, the raw, unmitigated power rushing through him when he summons it into his hands. He was scared of it, at first, as he was with many things, and while that fear has never really left him, it has come to be a comfort, an anchor in the whirlwind that his life has quickly become. It reminds him of who he was, who he still is, and, most importantly to him, it reminds him not to abuse his power, to turn into the violent spectres he has dealt with so frequently, the glimpse of himself he had caught in an averted future. It keeps him human, keeps them safe.

It doesn't stop him from revelling in his abilities, though, letting a smile split his lips as he feels his body shift and change, grow far lighter than it rightly should be and open a whole new realm of possibilities to him. There is nothing quite like the feeling of being a ghost; it is somewhat akin to how he imagines the universe would feel, making his body weightless and time seeming to pause, just for a moment, to let him bask. He is more alive when he's a ghost than he has ever felt, and he doubts that the novelty of it will ever wear off (unless, he will occasionally humour, he becomes a full ghost when he dies, though he doesn't enjoy thinking about that too often). What he does with the ability is even more important to him, protecting those who cannot protect themselves, fighting off that which the living have little protection against. He has taken it upon himself, a single boy at fourteen, to do the work of many, to take on alone what others would require a squad for.

Which is probably why, in the end, it begins to take its toll on him. It's subtle at first, barely noticeable amidst the plethora of other, more pressing occurrences in his life, health taking a back seat to heroism. Fatigue settles in like an old friend, made prominent from late nights and early mornings and using his powers too often, summoning too much at once instead of pacing himself. His friends notice, of course, waking him up when he dozes off in class and recommending he get to sleep at a decent time, and while he tries to follow their advice, it never really takes. Almost every time he heads to bed at a somewhat decent hour, he gets that familiar chill deep in his chest or catches an alert from his parents' warning system, and he relinquishes the relative safety of his bedroom to take to the skies.

Eventually, he figures, the exhaustion is deep enough that while he feels mostly fine, he begins to feel things that aren't there; specifically, ghosts. He is followed by a constant feeling of death, dry and musky and coarse in his throat, respite only coming when the chill touches his bones and flows from his mouth, but there is nothing to follow it up, no screams or wails or any kind of attack. It could be another thing like Spectra, he thinks, a ghost in hiding, but he gets the feelings no matter where he is or who he's with, and he is left at a loss for any kind of explanation. It continues to grow in frequency until the cold is near constant, and he tries to write it off as a simple change in seasons, but it is too early in the year and he seems to be the only one who can feel it; when his friends wonder why he's shivering, ask why he's wearing a coat in eighty degree weather, all he can say is "You don't _feel_ that?", and their looks of bemused concern confirm what he already knows.

Once the pain begins, he turns to the ghost zone. He can't risk seeing a human doctor, alerting his parents being an even worse idea, and he has the feeling that this is more of a ghost problem than human. He has been spending more of his spare time as a ghost these days simply for the relief; Phantom feels far less of it than his human half, and while spending extended time as a ghost still tires him out, the effects are far less painful than if he just stayed human. As a ghost he is weightless, timeless, free of what ties his body down. The ghost zone, while still scaring him more often than not, becomes his respite, his sanctuary – and his chance at finding out what's wrong with him. He tries Frostbite first, explaining his plight and subjecting himself to the necessary tests, but there is little that the beast can tell him; his human half is growing weaker (as much, he already knew), and that with the more often he goes ghost, the worse it becomes.

He tries Clockwork next, hoping to figure out how or why or what he should do from here, but, as is usually the case, the only answer he gets is enigmatic and vague. "While your fate is sealed," he says, "It is up to you to decide how you get there; as a boy, or as a man." Danny tries his best not to snap, to demand something real, a way to make it stop, because he knows that the beholder of time has his restrictions, but it doesn't make it any easier to bear.

"At least give me an idea of where to start," he pleads, desperate for answers, for _anything_ , so Clockwork gives a weary sigh and gestures to his portal, the surface wavering in a way that is quickly growing familiar to reveal an image of Sam and Tucker, in what Danny assumes to be his time.

"You can begin with them," Clockwork tells him, the portal shifting back to swirling greens. "Open a door. The fresh air will do you good."

At first he does not understand, but as he lies awake that night staring at the dark blue-grey of his glove in the moonlight, the meaning finally hits him, and he reaches for his phone. One of his favourite things about having scientists for parents is that nearly all of the rooms are sound resistant, so he doesn't have to worry about waking anybody up but Sam as he dials her number, and even though it's two in the morning on a weekday, she always picks up, this time being no different. She expects it to be a ghost problem (and she's not wrong, he thinks ironically), asking if he's okay, where he is, and the familiarity is a comfort as he assuages her, tells her it's not an attack, which only serves to make her more concerned; changes to the routine are often bad news.

They talk for hours, Danny coming clean about everything he's been hiding, the chills, the fatigue, the chronic pain in his bones, why he's been spending so much more time as a ghost, why he's been cagey and elusive and has occasionally snapped at them, reiterating for her what those in the ghost zone had told him. She stays mostly silent, letting him ramble until he is nearly in tears, and only once he has gotten it all out, once he stops to take a deep breath and falls silent, does she share her own thoughts, thanking him for finally telling her and vowing, swearing, to find a way to help him. "You're going to be alright, Danny," she says, "We'll find out what this is, and we'll get through it."

Tucker is informed at school the morning after, and then the search for answers begins. Finding any information on half-ghosts is difficult enough, as they are practically unheard of, but finding information about half-ghosts with medical conditions (aside from the typical seizures and hallucinations often assumed to be possession) is virtually impossible, even with Tucker's expertise on dredging up the most obscure websites that might have a chance at carrying information relevant to them and Sam's vast collection of books regarding the occult and supernatural. This lack of results, unfortunately, leads them to turn to one of the only other people who might have a snowball's chance at giving them something useful, which leads to weeks of procrastination and avoidance of the subject (in all but the case of Sam, who really just wants something to be done about it); that is, until the exhaustion gets to be too much for him, his head swimming and the world lurching the way it does when he shifts in the air only longer, and he passes out in the middle of the gym room floor.

He wakes up to Tucker and Sam bickering quietly beside his bed at home, trying to whisper but ending up just quietly shouting, and it's comforting until he remembers what happened, asking them for answers once he's sitting up and has had a glass of water. Apparently it was late enough in the day that they were granted permission to leave school, Jazz driving them back here, that he'd only been out for about an hour and a half. They all agree that this has gone too far now, and this was the last straw; it's time to go see Vlad.

He's about as thrilled to see them as they are to be there, but he invites them in and shows them to his study and asks them what on earth they're doing there. With no viable excuses up his sleeve, Danny gets right to the point and tells him he's sick, somehow, and before Vlad can get mad and throw them out, he launches into an explanation, prattling off the symptoms and the worry and the confusion and the results of their efforts in trying to find answers, and instead of being angry, Vlad seems to be legitimately interested, listening to it all with hands clasped thoughtfully against his mouth.

As they had expected, asking Vlad for help is not without its price. He is quick to try and strike a deal; "There's no guarantee I can help you," he tells them, eyes curiously settled on Danny in the chair across from him – as Phantom, so that he is able to think straight for this discussion – "But you must promise me something; if I help cure you of whatever this is, you must give me free reign."

Sam and Tucker are unsure, as they have right to be, but Danny has very little left. "I'll stay out of your way," he agrees, "Just. Please," and Vlad's grin is marginally less sinister than usual. They don't bother asking what he gets out of this deal if they don't find anything; they all have a feeling they know.

So it is that Danny ends up in Vlad's lab, this time voluntarily, hooked up to all kinds of monitors and sensors while Tucker and Sam stand beside him and keep an eye on Vlad. They refused to let Danny in here without them, and Vlad simply didn't want the hassle of trying to keep them out. At first all he's doing is collecting data, planning to go through and study it all later, take another sample in a few days' time, so once Danny is free of the equipment and sent back home with a weak promise of "I'll call if I find anything," all they can do is wait.

He is granted the following day off school (thankfully without raising too much suspicion with his parents, claiming a simple bug) for rest, of which he takes all he can get. Most of his day is spent alone in his room, Tucker and Sam texting him throughout the day to check on him, and while he is there for rest, he doesn't get much of it. He stays ghost to help him get to sleep, but just as he starts dozing off, his body shifts back to human, bringing with it all the discomfort he is trying to avoid and waking him back up again. He remembers that Frostbite told him it would get worse the more often he was Phantom, but it's getting to the point where he really doesn't care. If it will give him some respite, even if only temporary, he's going to take it. His friends bring a present when they come by that afternoon, something that Tucker has been working on; a modification of something that Skulker has used on Danny in the past, designed to put him to sleep but keep him in ghost form. He's reluctant to take any kind of drug, especially one courtesy of someone out to kill him, but he hasn't had a good night's sleep in weeks, and when he finally does go down, it's one of the best nights he's had in a long time.

They're back at Vlad's for tests again that Sunday, a noticeable difference in the readings and the atmosphere as Vlad studies them. He gets Danny to go ghost (though he unplugs himself from the monitors first – there's no way he's going to give Vlad the chance of collecting morph sequence DNA, which went _so_ well the last time) before taking readings again, face lighting up in surprise. "Your ghost powers are far stronger than I thought," he explains later, once he's made sure of his findings and once Danny has somewhere better than a table to sit down. "Your ectoplasmic readings are extremely high, and while this would usually be a concern, for me specifically, you're not going to be able to fulfil that potential for some time. Your human half can't keep up, can't contain it, and so your ghost half is taking you over."

They all know what that means, in the end, but Danny still has the gumption to ask, needs to hear it for it to be cemented as a reality. "What happens when it does take over?"

For once, Vlad doesn't say anything, setting his readings aside with something almost resembling sympathy in his features. Sam is the one to break the silence, her voice thick with emotion. "It will destroy your human half," she says, pauses as his eyes – blue, for now – meet hers. "You're essentially going to die."

It's like being stuck in a maze, he thinks, wandering aimlessly for hours, days, until he is suddenly given a bird's eye view, the answers sprawling out before him and making him wonder how he hadn't seen it sooner. Clockwork's comment about parades springs to mind, rather aptly, as it all clicks into place, everything he'd heard and everything he'd been told and everything he had been yet to understand. He could stop going ghost altogether, at least for now, to give his body time to recuperate from the spikes in spectral energy, from the effects of being a ghost, or he could continue to do what he has been, staying as a ghost to fight off the pain and unwelcome town visitors, to fulfil the duty he has placed upon himself. Sam, ever the voice of reason, suggests he hold off on Phantom for at least a little while, to see how well things can be managed without and to give him more time to think about what he wants to do. He's sure that if he's careful, if he is only a ghost in moderation once he's healthy again, that he can still work with both, but for now they just need this trial period.

It's one of the most agonising things he's ever done. It's nowhere near as painful as, say, getting electrocuted and filled with extreme amounts of ectoplasmic radiation during the opening of a portal he's standing inside, but it's pretty far up his list of 'things to never do again'. He is forbidden from going ghost at all, Sam and Tucker and Jazz promising to take care of any ghosts if they show up (there has been a surprising lack of them about, thankfully, but that's probably because there are now two halfers in town, one of them being Plasmius – word travels quickly in the ghost zone) while Danny is stuck at home for days, more than a week, unable to eat or sleep or focus on anything but the fever and the nausea and the chills so deep he doesn't remember ever feeling warm, until his vomit comes up thick and green and smelling of wet iron and he sleeps for two days straight.

He's well enough afterwards that he goes back to school at the start of the following week, but rumours are already circling as to where he's been, what he was ill with. Most of them are just that he'd come down with the flu, which is the same story they'd been giving his parents, so he can live with that. It's far better than the alternative, after all. It is now, once he can stand for more than ten minutes without retching, that he finally learns how to properly hunt ghosts; with his powers on lockdown for the time being, he needs to find other ways to keep doing what he's vowed to himself to do. His parents are ecstatic when he asks them to train him in all the various weapons they use, giving him tips and advice that he hadn't been able to pick up when he was just grabbing something random, pointing and shooting. He's never been one for physical weaponry, but his recent drop into the supernatural and the dangerous has given him a newfound need for its use, and he has very quickly learnt to suck it up.

Months pass by before he is virtually back to normal, his human half balancing out again to give him something akin to his original form. It probably wouldn't have taken so long if he didn't keep reverting back to his ghost form, whenever he was in a pinch or needed that little bit of extra power, but at least he's been able to manage himself a little better, instead of going ghost all the time like he had been. It also keeps him further under the radar, which is a bonus, but it does make him more susceptible to attacks whenever he's in a fight, his human body far less resilient than his spectral one – which is the whole problem to begin with, really. It's ironic how these things come full circle. Vlad hasn't been able to find anything useful to balance out his energy levels without high likelihood of killing Phantom, but Danny is just surprised that he's still working on it, long after he'd helped them figure out the issue. Give a dog a bone, he supposed; it was just good that it kept Vlad busy, gave him less time to sit about and scheme.

Word begins to spread, through the ghost zone as well as through town, that Phantom has made himself scarce, only having shown up (in full) a handful of times over the months, and surprisingly it does not give him the reaction he'd been expecting. Ghosts don't show up all at once, eager to wreak havoc on the 'unguarded' town, but instead seem to be making themselves scarce as well, wreaking havoc in quieter ways and making it easier for Fenton et al to fight them off. He is lacking, though, in the one thing that made him feel like himself; there is a constant pull, a gentle tug in his mind and in his chest, dragging him towards the cold spot deep within himself that he has been desperately trying not to touch. The ghost is as much a part of him as his humanity is, so deeply ingrained in him now that he could not imagine being without it and staying sane, not now that he knows what it's like to have it.

He then knows, once he has come to this realisation, what he wants to do. He's not going to like it, nor are the others, his friends and his family, but he can't keep being split the way he is, stuck between life and death and something he's not, something he's supposed to be, and it is then that he begins to devise a plan. Sam is, of course, the first to find out, sitting in her basement watching a movie when he breaks it to her, expecting her enraged outburst and explaining to her, pleading with her, that this is what he needs to do. She spends days being mad at him, ignoring his texts and giving him very pointed looks at school, and he can only be grateful that she has not told Tucker – he couldn't stand to have both of his friends upset with him.

Eventually, though, she seems to reach some kind of conclusion to her anger, sending him a text that asks him to meet at her place. She doesn't say a word to him when he gets there, opening the door and taking his hand and leading him straight up to her room, slamming the door behind them, and it is when she turns to face him, looks at him with such expression in her eyes, that he fully understands. "Danny, I'm _sorry_ ," she murmurs, and her fists clench the way they do when she is trying not to cry and Danny wraps his arms around her, tells her it's alright. He understands – this is not the sort of thing he can tell a person and expect to have support him so readily. They talk it out, work through the kinks, make sure he knows what he's getting into, which involves another trip to the ghost zone; Frostbite is the most willing to give them the information they need, stepping through what will happen, and how.

It is then that Tucker is told, and Danny is forced to go through the anger all over again, only Tucker is more vocal, less steaming and more boiling over. Though his anger is louder, it passes much quicker, simmering down into bargaining, pleading, and eventual but reluctant acceptance. Danny is not swaying on this, not if he wants to stay who he is, and it takes them time to understand that, though they could never comprehend in full. Their worlds are too different now, no matter how closely intertwined they may be.

Danny has never died before. Not really. The first time he tends to discount, considering the end result, but even if he _did_ consider that death, it would still be nothing like this. Like waiting, slowly getting worse again as he focuses on everything but what he's leading up to, watches himself get sick and this time knowing what it means, understanding what will happen.

The hardest part is telling his parents. He considers keeping it from them, taking it to his grave (and further), but he feels that would be unfair. They've been nothing but supportive of him, neglectful only in their ignorance of what he's refused to tell them, and he knows, from the alternate realities in which they have found out, that they will still accept him. Sam offers to be with him when he comes clean, but this is a family matter, and he wants to be as comfortable as possible when he tells his ghost-hunting parents that he's one of them, that he _wants_ to be one of them. It's a long night, the four of them sitting in the living room with warm drinks as he tells all, hesitantly at first, but once the first crack appears the dam breaks open and he spills out the rest, his entire story from the first time he changed, what feels like so long ago, all the way up to the present day. He ends up in tears, crying harder than he has in so many years, and he makes his family cry, too, Jazz and his mother and maybe even his father, just, and he is more exhausted by the end of it than he has ever felt before, but he feels so much better having gotten it off his chest, having cleared the air and his name and his mind of the weight of lying to them all this time.

His fifteenth birthday is in nearly four months' time, and they plead with Danny to wait until then, to stay human just that little bit longer, and he has to agree. He has no idea how long it will take for his body to die, and he doesn't want to misjudge his timeframe, so he reluctantly stays human as much as possible until he hits that date, counting down. He spends much of that time with his friends, with his family, having as much fun as he can before it happens. He's not going to leave entirely, they know that, but he knows that they don't have the same sort of understanding as he does, seeing a distinct line between 'human' and 'ghost'. For him, it has always been the same, no different than choosing to have your hair tied up or left loose, and the decision he is making now is the same as simply choosing to cut it short.

He spends more of his time with his family rather than his friends, since his parents had only just found out and Sam and Tucker are much more used to him as a ghost, especially from all the time he has spent as Phantom in recent times. It's sometimes awkward, the way his mother will sometimes just stop and hug him in the middle of the hallway, holding him tightly before she lets go and hurries off down the hallway, the way his father has been teaching him how to build weapons and repair the Speeder, the way he looks at Danny when he thinks he isn't watching, the way Jazz stays out of his way at school and then chatters endlessly with him at home. He can see in their faces that they don't approve, that they don't want him to 'leave', but they respect his decision nonetheless and he couldn't have asked for more.

His birthday comes and goes, a quiet affair spent with his family and the two friends who have been with him from the beginning. He'd usually have done something at school, balloons maybe, but he has long since stopped attending, his parents granting him leave as soon as he'd told them. There's cake and streamers and his parents even let him try alcohol, though it's not to his liking, and after a mishap with a latent device they'd left in the open, they settle into a hearty game of 'which ghost-tracking devices actually work', enjoying themselves as they make (mostly) harmless fun. It's not an overly boisterous night, dissimilar to what one would expect of a 'dying' teen on his birthday, but he enjoys it immensely, and is glad that he waited.

The months after are trying times for all of them. Danny returns to being Phantom more often than not, both for the comfort and his sanity; the pain rapidly becomes even worse than before, burning under his skin and churning his organs and filling his head with so much _noise_ that it's a wonder he can function at all. He often wakes screaming in the middle of the night, on the odd occasion he is able to get to sleep and the pain spikes while he's under, and once it happens four nights in a row, his parents stepping in to find him writhing in agony and sobbing uncontrollably, they begin to sedate him, once again making use of the serum that Tucker had adapted for him.

Eventually he simply stops sleeping altogether. Having spent so much more time as a ghost, he's found that he doesn't always have to follow natural bodily functions; he doesn't have to breathe, often doesn't need to eat, and, as his human self dies, he rarely needs sleep. Sam and Tucker notice, of course, staying up late and texting with him in the early hours of the morning before they finally crash and he is left alone, but neither of them say anything. They know it means he is getting closer.

He begins to go a week or two at a time without changing back, and when he does, he can't help feeling like he shouldn't. There is one night when he changes, sitting down somewhere stable before he pulls at the little spot within himself that is growing harder to find, taking several long, painful minutes to catch his breath as it all washes over him with a kick, and he looks at himself in the mirror for the first time in months. He used to see an average boy, cool blue eyes and dark hair and that touch of freckles over his nose and nothing else, and then he saw a new path, smears of ectoplasm and blood and bruises dotting his skin. Recently he had only seen the Phantom, the him he was coming to be, pale white with that faint green glow and eyes like spring emeralds.

Now, he sees a boy battered and beaten, more worn than he ever was in the thick of the fight before he knew how to handle himself. He sees dark bruises beneath his eyes, sunken and lacking in their brilliant colour, grey and sickly skin clinging to his ailing body, red smeared beneath his nose from when he had made the shift. He sees a transition, a step from the old to the new, and he smiles, even though he can't help feeling disgust and shame at the sight.

Soon, this will be gone, and he will miss it, he's sure he will, but there is nothing that compares with the relief as he lets the soothing coolness come back, the release as he steps into his own skin, the easy grin as he becomes the white-green image he knows, more deeply than he has ever known anything before. Soon, he stops changing at all.


End file.
